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Aims This study aimed to explore the therapeutic effects of Lactiplantibacillus plantarum HG20 (HG20) on collagen-induced arthritis (CIA) rats and its mechanism. Methods and Results CIA rats were established by injecting bovine type II collagen for 7 days, and treated by intragastric administration HG20 for 21 days. The foot palm temperature and arthritis score were measured once a week. The pathological changes in the knee joint were observed by hematoxylin and eosin staining. The levels of cytokines were detected by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay, and the effects of HG20 on inflammatory and apoptosis pathway of spleen cells were detected by western blot analysis. The results indicated that HG20 reduced the joint swelling degree and foot palm temperature, inhibited the development of joint histopathology, decreased the levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, down-regulate the expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines by nuclear factor kappa-B pathway, and inhibited the apoptosis of spleen cells by inhibiting phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase/protein kinase B pathway and regulating apoptosis pathways. Conclusions HG20 had an adjuvant therapeutic effect on arthritis in CIA rats, and its mechanism might be related to the inflammatory and apoptosis pathway. Significance and Impact of Study These results revealed that HG20 could be used as a functional probiotic in the field of food and medical, and which played a potential role in the prevention and treatment of arthritis.

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to explore the curative effects of cardiothoracic surgery (CTS) for critical patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) using meta-analysis. METHODS Literature was searched using the following search terms: "cardiothoracic surgery", "intensive care unit", "critical patients", "post-operation", and "curative effects". Rev Man 5.3 was used for meta-analysis. RESULTS A total of 15 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were included, all of which had a low risk of bias, indicating medium and high quality. At 30 days after CTS, the number of patients with grade III and IV cardiac function was reduced by 76.84%, and the overall heterogeneity test results revealed that Tau2=0.09, Chi2=17.08, df=5, I2=71%, P=0.004

With the development of human-computer interaction technology, due to the advantages of virtual interaction and the quantification of motion capture data, gesture recognition controllers such as LeapMotion have been introduced into hand function rehabilitation training. However, when used individually, its measuring angle and measuring range are limited and cannot be applied in a large space. In this paper, the dual LeapMotion combination is used to unify the data in the two coordinate systems into the same coordinate system, thereby increasing the acquisition space range and space field of view. Through coordinate system conversion, the converted data is consistent with the actual test action. This method can be extended to multiple LeapMotion combinations.

Carbonaceous aerosols, including organic carbon aerosols and black carbon aerosols, are produced by the combustion of pulverized coal even under fuel-lean conditions. These carbonaceous aerosols can be particularly hazardous to human health. In this study, the chemical compositions and formation pathways of organic aerosols emitted during the combustion of high-sulfur-content coals were investigated. It was found that nitrogen-containing organic matter contains a significant proportion of organic aerosol mass from the combustion of high-sulfur-content coals, which is not the case for organic aerosols generated during the combustion of low-sulfur-content coals. The formation of organic aerosols was significantly enhanced when higher-sulfur-content coal was burned. A strong correlation between organic aerosol mass and the sulfate concentration was observed. It is proposed that acidic sulfate particles absorb the nitrogen-containing organic volatiles produced by coal pyrolysis onto the particle phase through...

Researchers are actively exploring techniques to enforce control-flow integrity (CFI), which restricts program execution to a predefined set of targets for each indirect control transfer to prevent code-reuse attacks. While hardware-assisted CFI enforcement may have the potential for advantages in performance and flexibility over software instrumentation, current hardware-assisted defenses are either incomplete (i.e., do not enforce all control transfers) or less efficient in comparison. We find that the recent introduction of hardware features to log complete control-flow traces, such as Intel Processor Trace (PT), provides an opportunity to explore how efficient and flexible a hardware-assisted CFI enforcement system may become. While Intel PT was designed to aid in offline debugging and failure diagnosis, we explore its effectiveness for online CFI enforcement over unmodified binaries by designing a parallelized method for enforcing various types of CFI policies. We have implemented a prototype called GRIFFIN in the Linux 4.2 kernel that enables complete CFI enforcement over a variety of software, including the Firefox browser and its jitted code. Our experiments show that GRIFFIN can enforce fine-grained CFI policies with shadow stack as recommended by researchers at a performance that is comparable to software-only instrumentation techniques. In addition, we find that alternative logging approaches yield significant performance improvements for trace processing, identifying opportunities for further hardware assistance.

The frequency of recent headlines indicates that attacks on governmental and corporate computer networks are increasing. Once they infect one computer, the attackers are quite likely to explore the network by accessing additional computers. Such “lateral movement”, i.e., the process attackers use to move from one computer to the next in a compromised network, increases the difficulties of preventing data exfiltration. To deal with challenges from large-scale data and little knowledge of the attackers, we propose Latte, a graph-based detection system to discover potential malicious lateral movement paths. We model computers and accounts as nodes, and computer-to-computer connections or user logon events as edges. We address the lateral movement problem in two ways. Starting with an infected computer or account, forensic analysis quickly identifies other compromised computers. To discover a new attack, general detection identifies unknown lateral movement across nodes which are not known to be compromised. A key component for general detection is a remote file execution detector which filters out the majority of the rare paths in the network. We provide separate algorithms for these subproblems and validate their effectiveness and efficiency on two, large-scale datasets, including one with a confirmed attack and one from a penetration test.

The presence of large numbers of security vulnerabilities in popular feature-rich commodity operating systems has inspired a long line of work on excluding these operating systems from the trusted computing base of applications, while retaining many of their benefits. Legacy applications continue to run on the untrusted operating system, while a small hyper visor or trusted hardware prevents the operating system from accessing the applications' memory. In this paper, we introduce controlled-channel attacks, a new type of side-channel attack that allows an untrusted operating system to extract large amounts of sensitive information from protected applications on systems like Overshadow, Ink Tag or Haven. We implement the attacks on Haven and Ink Tag and demonstrate their power by extracting complete text documents and outlines of JPEG images from widely deployed application libraries. Given these attacks, it is unclear if Over shadow's vision of protecting unmodified legacy applications from legacy operating systems running on off-the-shelf hardware is still tenable.

The relations of the stiffness and damping performance to the structure parameters of an active magnetic bearing (AMB) system and the frequency specificity of the control loop are analyzed. The effects of the control current phase on the stability, the stiffness and the damping properties of the system are presented. Meanwhile, a new concept of complex damping coefficient, the practical meanings of some system properties, and the calculation methods are discussed and described.

Web applications are constantly under attack. They are popular, typically accessible from anywhere on the Internet, and they can be abused as malware delivery systems.Cross-site scripting flaws are one of the most common types of vulnerabilities that are leveraged to compromise a web application and its users. A large set of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities originates from the browser's confusion between data and code. That is, untrusted data input to the web application is sent to the clients' browser, where it is then interpreted as code and executed. While new applications can be designed with code and data separated from the start, legacy web applications do not have that luxury.This paper presents a novel approach to securing legacy web applications by automatically and statically rewriting an application so that the code and data are clearly separated in its web pages. This transformation protects the application and its users from a large range of server-side cross-site scripting attacks. Moreover, the code and data separation can be efficiently enforced at run time via the Content Security Policy enforcement mechanism available in modern browsers.We implemented our approach in a tool, called deDacota, that operates on binary ASP.NET applications. We demonstrate on six real-world applications that our tool is able to automatically separate code and data, while keeping the application's semantics unchanged.

Measurement and analysis of modern malware systems such as botnets relies crucially on execution of specimens in a setting that enables them to communicate with other systems across the Internet. Ethical, legal, and technical constraints however demand containment of resulting network activity in order to prevent the malware from harming others while still ensuring that it exhibits its inherent behavior. Current best practices in this space are sorely lacking: measurement researchers often treat containment superficially, sometimes ignoring it altogether. In this paper we present GQ, a malware execution "farm" that uses explicit containment primitives to enable analysts to develop containment policies naturally, iteratively, and safely. We discuss GQ's architecture and implementation, our methodology for developing containment policies, and our experiences gathered from six years of development and operation of the system.

Kernel-level attacks or rootkits can compromise the security of an operating system by executing with the privilege of the kernel. Current approaches use virtualization to gain higher privilege over these attacks, and isolate security tools from the untrusted guest VM by moving them out and placing them in a separate trusted VM. Although out-of-VM isolation can help ensure security, the added overhead of world-switches between the guest VMs for each invocation of the monitor makes this approach unsuitable for many applications, especially fine-grained monitoring. In this paper, we present Secure In-VM Monitoring (SIM), a general-purpose framework that enables security monitoring applications to be placed back in the untrusted guest VM for efficiency without sacrificing the security guarantees provided by running them outside of the VM. We utilize contemporary hardware memory protection and hardware virtualization features available in recent processors to create a hypervisor protected address space where a monitor can execute and access data in native speeds and to which execution is transferred in a controlled manner that does not require hypervisor involvement. We have developed a prototype into KVM utilizing Intel VT hardware virtualization technology. We have also developed two representative applications for the Windows OS that monitor system calls and process creations. Our microbenchmarks show at least 10 times performance improvement in invocation of a monitor inside SIM over a monitor residing in another trusted VM. With a systematic security analysis of SIM against a number of possible threats, we show that SIM provides at least the same security guarantees as what can be achieved by out-of-VM monitors.

Automatic protocol reverse engineering has recently received significant attention due to its importance to many security applications. However, previous methods are all limited in analyzing only plaintext communications wherein the exchanged messages are not encrypted. In this paper, we propose ReFormat, a system that aims at deriving the message format even when the message is encrypted. Our approach is based on the observation that an encrypted input message will typically go through two phases: message decryption and normal protocol processing. These two phases can be differentiated because the corresponding instructions are significantly different. Further, with the help of data lifetime analysis of run-time buffers, we can pinpoint the memory locations that contain the decrypted message generated from the first phase and are later accessed in the second phase. We have developed a prototype and evaluated it with several real-world protocols. Our experiments show that ReFormat can accurately identify decrypted message buffers and then reveal the associated message structure.

Communication reliability is a desired property in computer networks. One key technology to increase the reliability of a communication path is to provision a disjoint backup path. One of the main challenges in implementing this technique is that two paths that are disjoint at the IP or overlay layer may share the same physical links. As a result, although we may select a disjoint backup path at the overlay layer one physical link failure may cause the failure of both the primary and the backup paths. In this paper we propose a solution to address this problem. The main idea is to take into account the correlated link failure at the overlay layer More precisely, our goal is to find a route for the backup path to minimize the joint path failure probability between the primary and the backup paths. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we perform extensive evaluations under both single and double link failure models. Our results show that, in terms of robustness, our approach is near optimal and is up to 60% better than no backup path reservation and is up to 30% better than using the traditional shortest disjoint path algorithm to select the backup path.

Objective This study was aimed at evaluating the clinical efficacy and safety of transcutaneous electrical acupoint stimulation (TEAS) to treat muscle spasticity after brain injury (Chinese Clinical Trial Registry: ChiCTR-TRC-11001310). Methods A total of 60 patients with muscle spasticity after brain injury were randomized to the following 3 groups: 100, 2, and 0 Hz (sham) TEAS. The acupoints Hegu (LI4)—Yuji (LU10) and Zusanli (ST36)—Chengshan (BL57) on the injured side were stimulated at 0, 2, or 100 Hz, 5 times per week for 4 weeks. The patients were followed up for 1 and 2 months after the treatments. The effects of the treatments on muscle spasticity at the wrist, thumb, the other 4 fingers, elbow, shoulder, knee, and ankle were evaluated by the Modified Ashworth Scale, and the effects on disability were assessed by the Disability Assessment Scale. The walking capability was evaluated by the Holden functional ambulation classification score. The overall performance was assessed by the Global Assessment Scale score and the improved Barthel Index. The safety of the treatments administered was also monitored. Results The wrist spasticity was significantly reduced from baseline at weeks 2, 3, and 4 of treatment and at the 1- and 2-month follow-up visits in the 100 Hz group (P < 0.01). Compared with 2 Hz or sham TEAS, 100 Hz TEAS decreased wrist spasticity at weeks 2, 3, and 4 of treatment and 1 month after treatment (P < 0.001). The other endpoints were not affected by the treatments. No treatment-emergent adverse events were reported during treatments and follow-up visits. Conclusions TEAS appears to be a safe and effective therapy to relieve muscle spasticity after brain injury, although large-scale studies are required to further verify the findings. Trial Registration Chinese Clinical Trial Registry ChiCTR-TRC-11001310 http://www.chictr.org

Services are capabilities that enable applications and are of crucial importance to pervasive computing in next-generation networks. Service Composition is the construction of complex services from primitive ones; thus enabling rapid and flexible creation of new services. The presence of multiple independent service providers poses new and significant challenges. Managing trust across providers and verifying the performance of the components in composition become essential issues. Adapting the composed service to network and user dynamics by choosing service providers and instances is yet another challenge. In SAHARA, we are developing a comprehensive architecture for the creation, placement, and management of services for composition across independent providers. In this paper, we present a layered reference model for composition based on a classification of different kinds of composition. We then discuss the different overarching mechanisms necessary for the successful deployment of such an architecture through a variety of case-studies involving composition.